Power Grid

Overview

Electricity, power, capitalism has never felt better! Power Grid is a game for 2-6 power-hungry and greedy electricity tycoons/moguls battling for money and control over various cities on a map. In the base game, you have the option of playing on the US map, or you can go with the Germany map.

Once you decide which map you want to play, then you’ll get to work, buying power plants on the auction block, buying material for power plants (unless you happen to play as the king of renewable energy), then building out your network of power stations in each city. Once you’ve done all that, you get to collect revenue based on how many cities you manage to power!

But beware. Money is a lot of things, but it isn’t everything. Supply and demand requirements from other players will be your biggest obstacle since they’ll be trying to bid your power plants up or jockeying for the same resources that you’re looking to obtain or even the territory you’re looking to expand to. And spend wisely; there have been many games where the winner manages to scrape by with $1 to beat the tiebreaker…

Core Mechanics: Auction, resource management, and area control.

Victory Condition: Power Grid’s victory condition comes into play once any player has built the minimum number of cities required to trigger end-game. And when that happens, the person who powers the most cities wins, whether the number of cities is greater, equal to, or less than the minimum number of cities needed to win. And if there’s a tie, whoever has the most money is the winner.

Ease of learning: Easy learning curve for a medium-weight game – Power Grid is a game that I’ve had a lot of success teaching to people. Each round of the game can be divided into discrete portions which have a single action for players to take. Once players get used to the flow of the game (takes about 2-3 rounds on average), they’ll usually dig into it pretty quickly as they grasp the underlying concepts. The most difficult part of this game is explaining turn order, but even that’s not thaaaaat difficult.